Jazz Wants to Kill G. William?

In the earliest days of working on I Hunt Killers, Jazz was originally going to have much more disturbing thoughts. In the final published book, he wrestles with his impulses, but when I was first spitballing and brainstorming, his brain was filled with lurid, grotesque fantasies CONSTANTLY.

That sort of thing works…a little. You can’t keep it up over the course of an entire novel, though — it becomes overwhelming. So I dialed it way back so that I still had room to build.

Anyway, this little blip below is from the very early days, when I was noodling around with exactly how messed up it was to live inside the head of one Jasper Francis Dent…

G. William was a good old boy, but not the stupid redneck type. He wanted people to think he was. It was convenient. But that slow Southern drawl belied the quick and lively intelligence in his eyes. Most people missed it. Not Jazz.

Jazz didn’t miss much of anything.

You couldn’t be a small-time hick cop and do what G. William had done: Catch the most notorious serial killer of the 21st century.

Jazz felt it rise up in him like a fever — the sudden, overwhelming lust, a lust that was so strangely nonsexual. He put a hand out to steady himself against the table.

Stop it! he commanded himself. Fight it!

“You all right, son?” G. William asked.

Son… It was the wrong thing — the perfectly wrong thing — to say when Jazz was in this kind of state. It made him think of his father, of his father and the other bodies that had turned up years ago, the bodies of his childhood.

“Low blood sugar,” Jazz lied smoothly. “I haven’t eaten today. Little dizzy.”

“Hell, whyn’t you say so?” G. William patted his pockets, jiggling his fat under the taut polyester of his sheriff’s uniform—

JAZZ THINKS OF GUTTING HIM, CUTTING OPEN THAT BLUBBER

—before diving into his left breast pocket and coming up with two hard candies, the cellophane wrappers crinkling. “Butterscotch? Little sugar boost.”

“Sure.” Jazz gave him the Thanks Smile.